365 Days of Bird Conservation

Today’s Conservation Action

Outdoor domestic cats are a recognized threat to global biodiversity. Cats have contributed to the extinction of 33 species and continue to adversely impact a wide variety of other species, including those at risk of extinction such as Piping Plover.

The ecological dangers are so critical that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists domestic cats as one of the world’s worst non-native invasive species.

Predation by domestic cats is the number-one direct, human-caused threat to birds in the United States and Canada, as the graphic on the left details. (2014 State of the Birds report.)

In the United States alone, outdoor cats kill approximately 2.4 billion birds every year. Although this number may seem unbelievable, it represents the combined impact of tens of millions of outdoor cats. Each outdoor cat plays a part.